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What Japanese Commanders Said After Kenney Broke Every Rule of Air Combat

January 1943. Rabbal, New Britain. Vice Admiral Gunichi Mikawa opens a report on his desk. Another convoy has reached lie safely. This one, the one before it, the 14 before that, he folds the report, sets it aside, steps out of the room. 500 m to the south in Brisbane’s Australia. An American general is reading the same numbers.

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13 separate attack missions over two days. Dozens of aircraft, one ship sunk. He opens his journal and writes one sentence. We are taking it on the chin. That American general’s name was George Kenny. Washington had not wanted to send him here. MacArthur had already pushed out two air commanders before him. Men who couldn’t deliver what he needed.

Men who learned the hard way that MacArthur’s patience ran short and his memory ran long. But Kenny hadn’t come to keep his job. He’d come to solve a problem no one had solved it yet. And 6 weeks after he wrote that line in his journal, 6 weeks, Mikawa would pick up a pen of his own and write back to Tokyo. It is certain that the success obtained by the American Air Force in this battle dealt a fatal blow to the South Pacific.

Two men, two sentences, 6 weeks apart. But this isn’t a story about the battle itself. It’s about everything that happened before it. A pilot who worked out the math on this thing and disappeared 6 weeks before it was ever used. A mechanic who bolted machine guns onto the nose of a bomber built something no one had ever asked for and proved it worked.

And a question that Japan never answered in words, only in what they stopped doing after March of 1943. If this is the kind of story you want to stay for, go ahead and hit the like button now, not for any complicated reason, just because that’s how these stories find the people who need to hear them. Now, let’s go back to the beginning.

July 1942, Washington needed a new air commander for MacArthur in the Pacific. Washington offered MacArthur Doolittle first. You know the name. 4 months earlier, Doolittle had led 16 army bombers off the deck of a Navy carrier and dropped the first American bombs on Tokyo. He’d come home to a Medal of Honor and a two-grade promotion.

He was the most famous aviator in America. MacArthur said no. He called Doolittle a showboat. What MacArthur needed wasn’t a man who could make headlines. He needed a man who could fix something broken and do it without making it about himself. The man they sent instead was a 52year-old general who had grown up in Massachusetts, fought as a fighter pilot in the First World War and was currently commanding fourth air force out of California.

No famous raids, no front page photographs. His name had never appeared in a war dispatch that anyone outside the army could name. George Churchill Kenny got the call on July 7th, 1942. He packed his bag and left. On the flight out to Australia, Kenny sat with his aid, Major William Ben. They talked about a problem that had been sitting in the back of both their minds.

The problem was simple to state and hard to solve. American aircraft had been attacking Japanese ships for months. High alitude bombers, careful approaches, textbook runs. The results were close to nothing. A ship moving at sea seen from 10,000 ft has time to change course between the moment a bomb is released and the moment it hits the water.

The math worked against every bomber in the Air Force inventory. Kenny and Ben were talking about what happened if you changed the math. What if you came in low? Not 1,000 ft, not 550 ft wave height, so low the bomb had almost no time to fall. So low you dropped it nearly flat, and it skipped across the water like a stone and hit the ship below the waterline.

The one place designed to be vulnerable. There was no doctrine for this, no training manual. No one in the United States military had ever done it at scale. It was just two men on an airplane doing arithmetic. Kenny landed in Brisbane on July 28th. The next morning, he walked into MacArthur’s headquarters. What he found was not an air force.

It was what was left of one. Most of the original Pacific Air Force had been destroyed in the Philippines in the first days after Pearl Harbor. What remained in Australia was worn out, under supplied and flying aircraft that were outmatched in almost every category by the Japanese Zero. The maintenance situation by one account was a swamp. Spare parts didn’t arrive.

Aircraft sat grounded for weeks. Pilots flew missions in planes that mechanics had kept together with whatever they could find. MacArthur had no confidences in any of it. He’d made that clear to both men who’d held the job before Kenny. He made it clear to Kenny, too. Starting the morning after Kenny arrived. July 29th, 1942.

MacArthur’s office, Brisbane. MacArthur sat down and began talking. He talked for half an hour without stopping. He went through the list. Everything the air force had failed to do since the war began. Failed to protect the Philippines. Failed to stop the Japanese advance across New Guinea. Failed to sink the convoys running troops and supplies down to lay.

Failed in one way or another at almost everything he’d been counting on air power to do. The Kenny sat and listened. After half an hour, he stopped him. he wrote later. I decided it was time for me to lay my cards on the table. He told MacArthur he wasn’t interested in what had gone wrong before he arrived.

He couldn’t fix the past and he wasn’t going to try. What he could do was fix what was in front of him. If MacArthur was willing to let him do it his way, if MacArthur wanted someone who would follow orders and manage the mess, there were other names on the list. MacArthur looked at him for a moment. Then he put his hand on Kenny’s shoulder.

I think we are going to get along all right. Kenny did not stay in Brisbane to read reports. Within days of that meeting, he was in New Guinea, walking airfields, talking to mechanics, sitting in on briefings with pilots who’d been flying combat missions for months and losing men they couldn’t replace. He wanted to see the problem from where the problem actually lived.

What he saw confirmed what he already suspected. Bombing ships from altitude didn’t work. Not with the number of aircraft he had. Not against ships that had room to maneuver. The numbers from every mission report he’d read said the same thing. Less than 1% of bombs dropped from high altitude against moving ships actually hit their target.

Less than 1%. He’d spent his career as a pilot. He understood what that meant in physical terms. A bomb dropped from 10,000 ft takes roughly 30 seconds to reach the water. In 30 seconds, a ship traveling at 15 knots moves 250 ft. The man releasing the bomb has to predict before he releases it exactly where the ship will be when the bomb arrives.

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